Graduate

An introduction to current theory and research on the teaching of writing and discussion of practical strategies for applying that research not only in composition classes but throughout the curriculum as well.

The course topic changes; please see the Schedule of Classes for the current topic.

The course topic changes; please see the Class Search for the current topic.

Twentieth-century Russian literary theory from Formalism and Marxism to Bakhtin and contemporary Soviet semiotics. Seminal theoretical and literary texts are discussed in the context of Soviet literary culture and politics: literary polemics of the twenties, subsequent consolidation of Communist Party control and the monopoly of Socialist Realism, post-Stalinist thaw, and the development of the Moscow and Tartu schools of semiotics.

Historical study of the concept of power as institutionalized in Indo-European society, elaborated in the ancient world, and bequeathed to the nation-states (Eastern and Western) of today. Focus is on the logic and ideas implicit in basic political, military, economic, and social structures. Readings in history, anthropology, linguistics, religion, political science, and myth.

Examines theories of film melodrama, genre theories, film language and visual style, and constructions of the nations as exemplified by Asian, European, Latin American and U.S. films, with special emphasis on Mexican, Cuban, and Argentinian examples. No prior film expertise necessary.

Examines changing paradigms of gender in Latin American feature films (1940-1990), exploring the applicability of currents of western feminist, gender theory to these peripheral texts. Provides instruction and practice designing college-level film courses.

1. Psychoanalysis: Barthes and Lacan; 2. Chaucer and fabliau: The Miller's Tale; 3. Verdian opera; 4. Films of John Carpenter.

The study of assorted fiction, poetry, and interpretive writing by women, with an eye to the implications of gender for literary theory and practice.

Through literary, critical, and theoretical texts, explores fantastic fiction as the subversive other of the bourgeois novel: a form which interrogates conventional narrative forms and theories of genre and reveals cultural anxieties about sexuality, subjectivity, racial and gender identity, religion, science, and the family. Authors include Walpole, Austen, Radcliffe, Le Fanu, de Sade, M. Shelley, Poe, E. Bronte, Hawthorne, Melville, B. Stoker, Conan Doyle, H. James, Conrad, Faulkner, Kafka, Toni Morrison, Lacan, Kristeva, Edmund Burke, Fanon, E. Said, P. Macherey, F. Jameson, Freud.

An in-depth overview of the early-mid periods of Freud's thought, beginning with the Project for a Scientific Psychology through the metapsychological texts of 1914-1918. The later Freud is discussed in the contexts of the career and writings of Jacques Lacan, in particular Lacan's doctoral dissertation, and the Seminars I and II. Both writers are assessed individually and in dialogue in discussions framed by contemporary critical theory, semiotics, and questions concerning cinematic practice. Special attention is paid to Lacan's analysis of Poe's The Purloined Letter.

Close reading of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason as the basis of modern critical thought. Focus is on the theory of representation and its reception both in 19th-century philosophy (Hegel, Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche) and 20th-century literary theory (Saussure, Freud, Heidegger, Derrida, de Man, Foucault, gender and cultural studies).

Explores fundamental concepts and aesthetico-political principles of key avant-garde movements: futurism, expressionism, Vorticism, Proletcult, and constructivsm. Particular focus on the interpretations of basic avant-garde frameworks in national contexts ranging from Great Britain to Italy and Germany to countries of Central and Eastern Europe.

Key debates and central theorists of postmodernism.

Concentrates on a reading of 19th- and 20th-century texts that interrogate the mainstream Western anthropocentric humanist tradition. Issues include the values of self-consciousness, autonomous agency, individual rights, hostility to technology, prostheses, cyborg identity and boundary confusions, postmodern technosublime, paranoia, and the domestication of cyberspace.

An in-depth study of a topic in Mediterranean and Near Eastern antiquity.

Narrative fiction from the age of Alexander through the first centuries of the Christian era, with particular attention to the influence of Near Eastern and African cultures on the formation of the European novel. Principal readings: The Alexander Romance, Petronius, Apuleius, Khariton, Achilles Tatius, Heliodoros.

Focuses on the political, historical, and ontological construction of the body in ancient Greek culture. Literary, historical, philosophical, and medical texts (Homer, Herodotus, Plato, Aristotle, Hippocrates) as well as visual media (vase painting, sculpture) are studied.

Primary texts from the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.E. in Athens, including drama, historical narrative, philosophy, zoological and medical treatises will be read in their historical, political, and spatial or architectural contexts and in relation to contemporary literary and cultural theory. Knowledge of Greek is not required.

Devoted to situating Greek tragic production within the political, historical, and cultural contexts of the polis and the western canon. Topics include the origins of tragedy, tragedy as a civic and political institution, the dramatic festival, the tragic construction of gender, mimesis.

Examines varying interpretations, appropriations, and exploitations of the Orphic myth in its threefold manifestation as harmony, descent, and dismemberment. Topics include the regeneration of language, the poet as priest, and the re-sacralization of an increasingly secularized world.

Medieval reworkings of stories and motifs drawn from the barbarian or Germanic tradition, including Beowulf, The Song of Roland, the Nibelungenlied, Snorri Sturlason: King Harald's Saga from Heimskringla, Njal's Saga.

Explores the European inheritance of definitions of woman (and by implication, man), through a study of key literary texts and historical documents from the early modern period. Emphasis on Italian and English texts; work in other European languages welcome.

Seeks to understand the recent convergence in early modern scholarship between queer theory and Renaissance studies and to explore the definitions and articulations of queer theory as a mode of textual criticism and practice.

In early modern Italy several factors converged to foster a boom in women's writing and publication. Course addresses context and content of these writings, dealing with key theoretical and historical issues surrounding women's entry into authorship in Europe. Knowledge of Italian not required.

Libertinism as a literary, philosophical, ethical, and cultural movement in England and France, 1650-1800. Three distinct but overlapping definitions of libertinism: religious atheism, philosophical materialism, and sexual license. Readings include Moliere, Behn, Rochester, Montesquieu, Diderot, Cleland, La Clos, and Sade.

Examines Italy's epic tradition against backdrop of its political and cultural history. Readings may include (subject to availability) Pulci's Morgante, Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato, Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, and Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata. Reading knowledge of Italian highly recommended.

What are the advantages and limitations of using postcolonial theory to study the Latin Middle Ages (twelfth–fifteenth centuries)? Topics include changing modes of cultural contact (commerce, crusade), the representation of internal minorities (Jews, heretics, slaves), and the emergence of nationalist thinking.

Deals with some reigning models of global/local dialectics, with literary and filmic texts as examples and challenges to these dominant theoretical frameworks. Also discusses tactics and emergences of transnational cultural studies in Asian-Pacific contexts.

Examines select modern French/Francophone philosophical and psychoanalytic discussions of difference in the work of Lacan, Fanon, Irigaray, Derrida, and Deleuze and their influence on current critical theory. Texts are studied in French although students may use translations.

Examines various critical perspectives on the writing of autobiography in Italy, including issues of gender; the construction of the self; theories of representation, narratology, and lyric form; political context. Principal readings in Italian: Dante, Petrarch, Renaissance female poets, Ugo Foscolo, Natalia Ginzburg, Primo Levi. Selected readings from St. Augustine, Rousseau, R. Barthes.

Study of the development of the Italian lyric from Romanticism to the present, with close stylistic and thematic analyses of the works of Leopardi, D'Annunzio, Ungaretti, Quasimodo, Pavese, and Montale.

Close reading of several texts that participate in Italian post-modern writing. Discussion of the postmodern return to narrative and its emphasis on readers; the attenuation of grand narratives of history, politics, and science; the functions of pastiche and play; self-reflexivity. Readings and discussion conducted in Italian.

Addresses Italy's literature and film of the postwar period, with emphasis on the use of these media in the nation's attempt to come to grips with its experience in fascism and the Resistance.

Critical study of the Decameron.

Study of the literary and political works of one of the most influential political thinkers of modernity. Readings include The Prince, selections from the Discourse and from Machiavelli's letters, at least one of Machiavelli's comedies, and his misogynist novella, Belfagor.Course taught in Italian.

Close reading of the poetry of Francesco Petrarch (1304-1374); examination of his construction of a modern lyric subjectivity and a poetics of desire.

Study of the phenomenon of the boom of a literary genre in Renaissance Spain: the autobiography. Why do soldiers, conquerors, picaros, and monks reveal their selves and their life experiences? What are common aspects and what do these texts reveal about the historic reality?

Focuses on different genres of the Renaissance period that flourished before the creation of Cervantes' Don Quijote. The course topic changes; see the Schedule of Classes for the current topic.

Study of the prose works of Cervantes (excluding his masterpiece Don Quixote) in order to understand the sociohistorical implications, and his ideology and style, which ultimately leads to a better understanding of Don Quixote. The texts studied give a panorama of the literary genres (pastoral novel, picaresque novel, etc.) during the Golden Age period and, simultaneously, serve as an introduction to the literature of Renaissance Spain.

In-depth examination of mysticism: Jewish, Christian, and Arabic; and of eroticism. Also looks at the idea of union in mysticism and eroticism.

Explores three related problematics: emergence of literature as a specialized social discourse, nationalism and education, coloniality and postcoloniality. Important questions: what are the national language and culture, what is the gender/genre of the nation.

By reading literary, critical, and theoretical texts, the seminar explores the various courses mapped by the genre in Spanish America since 1816 to the present. However, because of its board chronological range, it is done by focusing on selected topics and/or periods. May be repeated for credit as seminar topic varies.

Since its origins, the novel in Spanish America has been one of the strongest vehicles for social protest and identity quest. Concentrates on novel theories as expressed by Spanish American novelists from the 19th through 20th century, showing the development and uniqueness of the genre in Spanish America. Novelists include: de Lizardi, Gómez de Avellaneda, Isaacs, Azuela, Gallegos, Asturias, Carpentier, Bombal, Castellanos, García Marquez, Fuentes, Puig, Vargas Llosa, Sarduy, Ferré, Barnet, Allende.

A study of the essay in Spanish America from Sarmiento to the present which has fundamentally concentrated on problems of national or cultural identity. Authors include Martínez, Estrada, Mariátegui, Paz Castellanos, Salazar Bondy, Benedetti, Poniatowska, J.L. Gonzalez, Retamar, Monsivais, Ferré.

Addresses the ways in which poets and poetic movements have responded aesthetically to the region's (Latin America) geography of social, political and cultural experience. Trace the private and public voices who responded imaginatively creating a new poetics. Major movements such as modernismo, poesía pura las vanguardias, la anti-poesía poesía conversacional, pos-vanguardismo, and their major exponents are studied, as well as other poetic voices previously overlooked or underestimated.

By reading Puerto Rican, Cuban, and Dominican texts, explores questions of modernity and postmodernity of cultural, political, gender, and racial identities, while also addressing the position of Caribbean literatures within the Latin American literary canon.

Explores the literary creation of authors of African descent in Latin America. In addition to the study of Island, or Plantation literatures/societies, this course also derives into areas of the South American Pacific Rim where, by virtue of its natural resources, economics, and mode of colonization, a different kind of Afro-American literature, culture, and society has been produced. Students must be fluent in Spanish.

Modern Mexican women writers' struggle for interpretive power. Concentrating on autobiographical fictions, texts are read against Latin American feminist and cultural theories. Special attention is given to the particular problematics of gender, nation, and narration in postrevolutionary Mexico.

Addresses the problematics of these concepts as they relate to literary and cultural production in Latin America.

An examination of Latin American and Latino films in connection with relevant social and cultural issues and theories. Reading knowledge of Spanish is required.

Construction of new discourses of Spanishness after 1975, their negotiation in the context of European integration/globalization and against historical memories.

What is the role of reading in the theoretical revisions encompassed under the rubric of Latin American Cultural Studies? What changes and contributions have brought about the Cultural Studies emphasis on key words such as production-reception, consumption, resemantization, and reappropriation? These questions provide a framework for a historical-theoretical reconstruction of the place of reading and readers in Latin American cultural history.